I will say, having been away on hiatus for more than a year, I am personally startled by how little about the site has been changed since I’ve been gone. Mushroom meals is still essentially in beta, there’s still no dynamic, smaller-scale consumable-item economy, and even the spring event has the exact same “gameplay” (and I use that term lightly) as it did a year ago. Now that bank interest has been removed, that means that the major source of income is essentially four extremely repetitive games, with a grind cap of 3k per day.

It’s not that I don’t agree with the removal of bank interest - I think it’s a pretty good idea. But I think the timing for this decision is extremely poor.

When I was active one year ago, there was an average of, I’d say, maybe 200, 250 players online at a time. After I returned, that number has diminished to hovering around 100, if that. Now, there’s a lot to be said about why that might be, from community to economy to gameplay, but that’s a different essay - what I make this point for now is to comment on the timing of this decision.

From an outside point of view, the site already looks like it’s struggling to retain users and update with new content. I know I don’t play Mycena for the minigames, which, frankly, get very tiring when they’re grinded every day, and, honestly, with such a small number of active users, it’s hard to say I can play for the RP, since it’s so hard to align preference, taste, and other general pickinesses with such an insular community. So is it really the best idea to take away even more features? I can agree to a change, even say it’s a good idea, but the timing is just…a poor decision. I would have waited to bundle this change with a new feature or new game, something to make the site look like it’s actually adding more features, rather than post it on its own - which, correct decision or no, good economic policy or no, is going to look and feel like a punishment, or otherwise a removal of features from an already extremely skeletal site.

As for frieza‘s argument, I haven’t had time yet to review it in full, but I do disagree that the players have not been meeting the site’s halfway. What I would say instead is that the site has failed to provide engaging, interesting means to make nuggets. Players can grind to the 3k cap, but because the games are so repetitive, short, and there are only four, the “game” quickly becomes “work.” Crafting an engaging and fun game is solely the responsibility of the game developers, and it’s not the player’s fault for giving up when the game does not provide enough emotional reward in exchange for effort put in, IMO.

As an aside, you wanted to use the Bank to hide Gems.  Wouldn’t it be more fitting if Rikur has a vault to store people’s Gems instead?  I mean, he’s the one who sells us the Gems to begin with. 

“Secret vault?  Yeah, I could probably stash those gems for you….”

THAT is Rikur?  I didn’t know he had a name.  I thought he was slightly drunk banker dude.

As for frieza‘s argument, I haven’t had time yet to review it in full, but I do disagree that the players have not been meeting the site’s halfway. What I would say instead is that the site has failed to provide engaging, interesting means to make nuggets. Players can grind to the 3k cap, but because the games are so repetitive, short, and there are only four, the “game” quickly becomes “work.” Crafting an engaging and fun game is solely the responsibility of the game developers, and it’s not the player’s fault for giving up when the game does not provide enough emotional reward in exchange for effort put in, IMO.Chandelure

I can agree with that.  I think it’s both things.  In fact I think I briefly mentioned that some players are turned off by the earning options.  Keep in mind when I say the site has more than met new users halfway, it’s not just the games.  It’s also things like how cheap everything is, and how bank interest actually favors them.  Like grinding itself can be a barrier for people, but meeting that threshold opens up the site to newer players in a massive way.  The site has done a lot to cater towards the lower end of the economic range.

i’ve been waiting to post ‘cos my initial reaction was very emotional, and i don’t think that benefits anyone. :‘D but i’ve thought it through some, and now… well, i’m still pretty disappointed and frustrated but i think i can at least speak calmly and rationally.

this change leaves a bad taste in my mouth, mostly because of things others have said before me in the thread:

1) rich players being rich doesn’t really hurt poor players, because this isn’t real life and nobody is going to die if they don’t have a pixel dog

2) the economy has been stagnating for a while but i feel implementing other more “positive” changes first would have been better for PR

3) as several other older players have said, it’s not primarily interest that causes us to hoard, but the fact that there is nothing we want to buy!!

i’m lucky that i enjoy echolocation, but providing other minigames would hopefully incentivize more people to play them and make nuggets, rather than just saying “if you made your daily nuggets via interest, too bad for you” and not providing any alternatives :(

I’m in two minds about this update, possibly because I’ve been on both sides.

On the one hand, I’m generally broke. The only time I have more than 40k in my account is when I’m saving for the seasonal mushroom. So I’d essentially be getting the equivalent interest for nuggets that I rarely have. Which is certainly a positive thing.

On the other, I paid for my sprout entirely from nuggets, and it would have taken me significantly longer to do had I not had the interest. For about half of my savings, I was getting >500 nuggets. Which isn’t all that much, but it built up relatively quickly. It was almost as if I had an extra day a week to grind, without actually having to grind. And yes, when I started buying the PP for my sprout, it certainly stung to lose that interest.

I’m going to echo the thoughts of others here and say that this change does feel a bit empty. Mycena is one of my favourite petsites, but there haven’t really been any new features in recent memory. I know the new RP system is in the works, but that’s somewhat hollow if you don’t really RP or write much. It would be a lot easier to stomach this update if it came with the introduction of new features, be it something like a new game, or a new shop.

As a user that stopped playing MC for two years, I don’t think that this change will do anything to prevent the stagnation in the economy, and I agree with previous comments that say that grinding for currency is incredibly difficult. The payout given by minigames simply isn’t enough for the amount of time and effort necessary to put into the game, and the majority of them are both visually and intellectually unstimulating.

And, as others have pointed out, having many rich players does not impact the poorer players. In fact, many of the rich on this site seem incredibly generous and often gift the poorer players. As there seems to be quite limited player-to-player sales (compared to other pet sites I’ve seen), the rich does not significantly affect the poor, especially as there is no limit to the amount of digital pixel currency that could be generated.

Also, the $700 “lost” through bank interest is a misleading and pointless figure. Would anybody have really bought those gems instead of achieving them through bank interest? The impact on the profit of the site-owners would be negligible, in my opinion.

There are so many other solutions that could have been instated to prevent those 36 extremely rich from profiting so much off of bank interest (others have mentioned caps or a reverse curve to the interest rate). Instead, I feel that getting rid of the bank interest will only turn off newer players… At least the bank interest had previously given me an incentive to work harder now so that it would be easier for me in the future.

EDIT: I was able to read what others had to say more in-depth. While I agree with many of frieza’s points, I don’t agree that maxing out the daily nugget cap is quick and easy. I’m not sure how they’re achieving that in 20-40 minutes (though if you have an answer, feel free to PM me; I’d love to make that much so quickly). I also don’t think that one should blame others for not doing enough… Part of creating a successful pet site is keeping users engaged enough to put effort into it, and, yes, this includes easy ways to earn the currency. I have literally never played another pet site where it is so difficult to earn enough to buy even a single apparel piece, let alone another pet. Users really have zero obligation towards pet site creators—rather, it’s their job to create a site that will create a loyal userbase.

In addition, while there may be ideological implications to glitch’s reasoning for the decision, this is ultimately an attempt to attract new players; I really don’t think that there’s that much more to it. Though frieza definitely makes a lot of really good points that I hadn’t really thought of.

Also, while I completely understand wanting players to buy more gems, this is really not the way to do it. Attracting a larger userbase who enjoys the site’s content and gets attached to it (after they’ve spent time and effort dressing pets and creating) is definitely necessary for more revenue. Making the “stick firmer” will not attract more new users.

glitch I’m curious as to why this is the final step that has been decided, rather than rebalancing interest rates? I know they’ve been adjusted in the past—but since the idea was to help newbies, do interest rates have to work similar to how they do in the real world? (Bc in the real world, we all know that interest penalizes poor people and benefits the rich :p)

As I understand it, the current interest rates look something like this:

Why not implement a formula more like this?

Seems to me a revised formula could both help newbies and poor people find a more stable economic balance, while decreasing payouts for folks with a lot of nuggets, as well as to discourage to tendency to hoard rather than spend.

A note: since interest is currently only calculated by nuggets in the bank, it seems to me that in order to prevent exploitation of this kind of formula, interest would need to be calculated for all nuggets in the account rather than those only stored in the bank.

Thank you Azurrys!

Now that I’m more awake and had some time to consider this announcement, and read over some of the other posts, I have to agree that the timing of this could be better. While I don’t really have much preference one way or the other on whether we have bank interest (I’m going to save to reach a certain goal then spend everything either way, and I think there are probably a fair number of other players like me), this is the second feature in a row that we’ve lost with no real new features added. And unlike the name change feature, which was rarely used and so didn’t really affect regular gameplay, this one is something most of us use every day and losing it will likely impact how we budget our earnings.

Sure there is a new shop and new RP mechanics in the works, but neither has been implemented. In any case the new RP mechanics won’t do much for those who don’t do much RPing, and a new shop doesn’t do anything for those who either aren’t good at or who are totally burnt out on the current games. I max out on the games nearly every day and frankly a lot of the time it doesn’t feel much like playing a game anymore, and thats with me swapping back and forth between Cave In and Spellstones. And I know that there are plenty of people who only enjoy one game and aren’t good enough at the others to make it worth bothering to them to swap between them which just makes things even more frustrating.

It would be awesome if we could get some of those mini-games from old events as permanent features, I personally would love to see Mastermind and that dice game added. Those were super fun, and would be awesome to add to what we already have games-wise.

I’m an oddball player here. I’m here to trade for FR stuff. In the beginning I would regularly trade nuggets to get offsite trades and rarely to buy gems to get monthly stuff here. I was pretty compulsive about maxing out daily for the first couple years until I bought everything I wanted and then ended up only doing events and collecting interest because the games got too boring and I didn’t find most of the activity content interesting.

Now it’s harder to find those trades because players with offsite currency have already built up nugget balances to the point where interest is probably the majority of their earnings. Will killing interest help? I think eventually it will for me as long as the site continues to grow and add content. In the meantime it will stop magnifying the difference between a long-time and semi-dedicated player and the super casual players. I really dislike the effects of bank interest on pet sites. Unless the interest collected is capped it quickly grows out of control. I have a very old account on neopets where I’m up to a million in interest every week that I keep to remind myself what a bad idea it is. Outside of events I don’t think I’ve played a game there in 6 years.

I read frieza’s post and while the math is a bit off (632,652 nuggets = 1k nuggets daily interest, 3k via games + selling fishing drops per day) it doesn’t take that much longer than 5 months even if you don’t post or trade. You also can’t spend during that time so that would also stretch out how long it takes but that’s a personal issue. As for the implications, I’m pretty sure MC needs RL money to stay open. Convincing us to spend RL money means increasing the things we can spend it on (yay carrot!) or stretching out the amount of time/grinding (stick) it takes to get stuff so we buy our way to a shorter route.

Removing interest gives long-time players and dedicated players a firm stick so I’m hoping for lots of carrots.

While I agree with many of frieza’s points, I don’t agree that maxing out the daily nugget cap is quick and easy. I’m not sure how they’re achieving that in 20-40 minutes (though if you have an answer, feel free to PM me; I’d love to make that much so quickly).favvn

It’s not even so much that it is inherently quick and easy, it’s that people can put in effort over weeks and months to get to a point where it becomes quick and easy.  Styx and I basically have the same story.  It used to take multiple hours to play Spellstones and get the 3k but now I can do it much more quickly.  We could talk about how it’s not ideal for people to have to become masters at a game to grind easily, but that world IS there for people.  And you’re not even just doing it more quickly.  You are putting less actual effort into it.  That’s how mastering skills works technically.  You perform better while at the same time putting less demand on your brain to perform the task.  I only know the world of Spellstones but other users have hit the ~10 minute range at best in Echolocation. 

 

I also don’t think that one should blame others for not doing enough… Part of creating a successful pet site is keeping users engaged enough to put effort into it, and, yes, this includes easy ways to earn the currency. I have literally never played another pet site where it is so difficult to earn enough to buy even a single apparel piece, let alone another pet. Users really have zero obligation towards pet site creators—rather, it’s their job to create a site that will create a loyal userbase.favvn

Well I always see this sort of thing as there being responsibility on both sides.  It’s up to MC operators to create the best, most engaging site they can, and it’s up to us to do the best we can if we are going to stick around.  If someone chooses not to grind, or has trouble with it, etc… I think actually they are to blame for the situation to some extent.  Now if you want you can just choose a meaty % of blame and assign it to staff.  It’s 90% their fault, whatever.  In the end the person who in theory could do better for themselves still isn’t.  You don’t want to spend an hour and a half per day grinding?  Well put in the work and make it so those days are long behind you.  Find the games tedious, etc?  Yeah hopefully staff puts out a new game or whatever.  But where the staff side fails, your own responsibility begins.

 

In addition, while there may be ideological implications to glitch’s reasoning for the decision, this is ultimately an attempt to attract new players; I really don’t think that there’s that much more to it. favvn

Yeah it may not be strictly ideological.  Either way there was this weird PR spin put on it that feels very flimsy.  It doesn’t feel genuine.  It may not even be about the 700 dollars.  It may just be about trying to do what they can to tinker with the economy without creating meaningful sinks.  Like we get it.  There may not even be the resources to expand MC deeply.  Just be up front about it instead of the talking points trotted out. 

As for attracting new players… this site has catered towards new users since its inception.  All that it really needs to do is fix this grinding 3k problem because many people can’t or refuse to grind the 3k with the current games.  I think many of them could be trained to do it in 20 minutes per day if they really wanted it, but it is what it is.  And it’s interesting to see the interest removal exacerbate the grinding problem as people who dislike grinding but did it bit by bit over months and years are losing the interest that let them not have to full-grind. 

 

I read frieza’s post and while the math is a bit off (632,652 nuggets = 1k nuggets daily interest, 3k via games + selling fishing drops per day) it doesn’t take that much longer than 5 months even if you don’t post or trade.Mistral

Well I was rounding some numbers, but the 5 months figure was for a top tier sprout which is 680k, at or near my current interest level.  And remember, we are removing it.  Top tier sprouts are now going to take 7.5 months at 680k (which…last I checked PP prices were actually raising that figure, not sure where it is now).  So 8-9 months for an UH Sprout.  I am losing 40% of my income so it will all take 40% longer to do the things I am trying to do.  Poor me I know I know.  But I actually am concerned for other users who grind the daily 3k less than I do.  The less you do the daily 3k the more screwed you are.  I think they are putting pressures on the wrong thing, in terms of player growth and retention.  But we’ll see, I guess.

 

As for the implications, I’m pretty sure MC needs RL money to stay open. Convincing us to spend RL money means increasing the things we can spend it on (yay carrot!) or stretching out the amount of time/grinding (stick) it takes to get stuff so we buy our way to a shorter route.Mistral

You’re probably on to something here.  I’m not able to help them out this way, though.  My role has been more indirect, selling things in the economy to grease the wheels in the heads of people who enjoy themselves and are willing to lay their dollar down.  I will actually have to become more disconnected from the economy after this change, so I will be helping them even less.  I did bring a friend to the site who spent now and then, so there’s that.

 

I think removing interest is a good idea—or, at least, a cap if that ends up changing—but on its own, I can’t see it helping the economy so much as worsening it. With gem rates remaining stagnant, shop prices staying the same, and there generally not being much use for nuggets, all I can see from this is a significant decline in nugget-to-PP exchanges. How many people exchange PP because they are interested in nugget interest? Will the nugget-to-PP rate change or remain the same, with such a slow user and site economy? I’m not so sure nugget value will go up in the next year or two unless other changes are made.

We don’t have games based around our pets; we don’t have repeat consumable items (like a crafting or battle system would require); and we don’t have a continuous loot system (like battle or adventure) to keep people here when they’re bored.

I like the pets here, and I like the Creative Collective, but I personally participate in art and RP elsewhere and purchase adoptables with USD elsewhere because it feels empty here. Half the forums I look at go back multiple months on just the front page—including the MC Discussions forum, which is usually indicative of a dead site if even the main discussion forum moves at a glacial pace, with only three active threads—none of which anyone can just hop into, because they each serve an extremely specific purpose. MC doesn’t have much of a pull for new players and doesn’t have many games to keep people here. I’m not sure if MC advertises, but it feels like a no… I heard of this site through word of mouth in the first place, and I’ve gone many months hearing nothing about MC offsite despite engaging with similar communities.

I will probably find myself logging in less often. Daily streaks stress me out; with Furvilla, the daily streaks make me less inclined to return to the site for a day or two because I don’t want to worry about that. The Dappervolk daily streak is as tiny as the proposed MC daily bonus and, in the absence of interesting games, gives me no incentive to return daily, so I usually don’t. I don’t feel especially incentivized with the current 300 nuggets of interest I collect here on MC, and 50-100 nuggets probably won’t bring me back at all. I know I barely noticed the spring event was starting because I didn’t visit daily.

I understand MC’s point as an RP adoptables site, so I’m not exactly expecting some sort of adventure or battle game. But MC feels… isolated. Like nobody knows about it, or if they do, they looked at it once and left. If you want to RP with unique or semi-unique adoptables or avatars, there’s many other sites one can find that, sites with large-to-massive amounts of items and multiple engaging games, sites that provide loot and a constant stream of rewards with sinks to match, sites with active user communities because they bring new people in and keep them interested.

I think I really want to know what direction MC is going to go. I think the new RP system is going to be a good step, whenever it’s developed and if it’s going to be available outside of events, but for the moment, I don’t see much to pull in and keep new and less-invested players around. I understand incentivizing spending, but it also looks like reducing a daily login incentive for many players.

Chimerical

Unless I’m misunderstanding your post, the interest rate currently uses the second chart. More nuggets = lower rate. Ex. I have 7% interest with 133k nuggets, but the rate starts at 8% if you have nothing in the bank.

Vely is it? well, that shows how much I pay attention to numbers xD

frieza The thing is, their main goal is to attract new users. As others have pointed out, they need a flow of IRL money to stay afloat, and having a larger userbase will not only generate more ad money but will potentially create more long-term users who choose to buy currency. This is what they claim to be their underlying reason for cutting interest rates—it all ultimately leads to keeping newbies around long enough for them to become loyal players.

Well I always see this sort of thing as there being responsibility on both sides.  It’s up to MC operators to create the best, most engaging site they can, and it’s up to us to do the best we can if we are going to stick around.  If someone chooses not to grind, or has trouble with it, etc… I think actually they are to blame for the situation to some extent.  Now if you want you can just choose a meaty % of blame and assign it to staff.  It’s 90% their fault, whatever.  In the end the person who in theory could do better for themselves still isn’t.  You don’t want to spend an hour and a half per day grinding?  Well put in the work and make it so those days are long behind you.  Find the games tedious, etc?  Yeah hopefully staff puts out a new game or whatever.  But where the staff side fails, your own responsibility begins.frieza

I understand that you see the responsibility on both the users and the staff, and I do agree with many of the points that you made in your post about the fundamental problems in the site. And I even agree with your response that people should put in the work—but only if people were complaining about being poor. Telling them to put in the work is a valid response if this was just because of people begging for money.

But, like you mentioned, the vast majority of users will not be willing to put in the work and work months like you and styx had so that it becomes easier, which is a reason why the site is not growing—newbies don’t want to see that they need to spend days on this site grinding constantly to even just buy a piece of apparel, let alone set up the nest egg that allows for easier revenue-earning. Also, very few come to a pet site to master a skill. They come for entertainment. This decision to remove interest rates is not the result of people complaining about lack of money, it’s the result of their stagnant userbase and concerns about IRL revenue-earning.

As for attracting new players… this site has catered towards new users since its inception.  All that it really needs to do is fix this grinding 3k problem because many people can’t or refuse to grind the 3k with the current games.  I think many of them could be trained to do it in 20 minutes per day if they really wanted it, but it is what it is.  And it’s interesting to see the interest removal exacerbate the grinding problem as people who dislike grinding but did it bit by bit over months and years are losing the interest that let them not have to full-grind. frieza

MycenaCave has existed for years and yet its playerbase remains at, what, a measly 250? Their chat rooms are even more quiet than they have been before. In the forums, you often see the same old players posting again and again. Like, I recognize a lot of the usernames in this thread simply because there are so few users who actively engage in the community. Yes, they cater to new users, anybody can see that, yet the thing is, clearly their catering is not working. This is a decision that the staff believes will attract more users.

Anyways, it appears that we’re mostly on the same side regarding the decision. At least this thread provided a place for people to voice their suggestions and opinions on the economy and user-retention.

i think this is probably a good change.

it’s bad for me in that i don’t really have a reason to stick around anymore once it’s gone. i typically only log in and deal with items on the market so i can squirrel away money in the bank.

will there be more added to the site to incentivize the economy ? new games, items, goals ?

it feels like the economy is stagnating, with or without the bank interest taking part. this will slow things perhaps, but i think it’ll do far from fixing it. with a bank account that accrues interest over 1k– i agree with what others have said. it is incredibly difficult to afford apparel pieces etc. especially when starting out.

i’m a bit of an odd player though in that i’ve been here from the start as a super casual player and sold an account number to kickstart my bank account. i earn most of my income through my bank account now, and it’s in fact one of the only reasons i log in.

I think the elephant in the room here is that Mycena is a custom art site with freemium pet site mechanics on top. It’s not (or is no longer) a pet site with some premium custom options. The players with the most nuggets already “beat” the non-custom portion of the game. Nuggets exist for many folks as a means to an end. (the means = interest, the end = PP). Since the introduction of PP, we’ve seen the gem market literally disappear (the OP of this post mentions a “standard” gem:nugget conversion of around 1:3370, but when was the last time gems were readily available for that price? Certainly not in the last year, year-and-a-half).

I think the reason people aren’t buying gems isn’t because nuggets are too easy to get. They’re not spending money on gems because, if they have money, they’re spending it on PP. Removing the interest rate disincentivize selling PP for nuggets, but I’m not sure it will de facto create a desire for people to pay for gems vs PP. It’s been mentioned before, however, that PP is not a good metric for measuring success because it primarily pays artists, not the day-to-day operations of the site.

So, is this a catch-22? People haven’t been spending enough money on the non-custom side of MC to justify development of more daily-engagement stuff (games, fishing, etc), but without engaging stuff to do daily people are less likely to spend money?

Personally, I’m hoping that the adventure feature beta’d a while back is planned to release soon, since nuggets earned via forum posts have their own daily cap (iirc). That would be another way to support Mycena’s stated focus on storytelling and creativity, without putting the burden entirely on the users.

I want to echo most other posts here, in that I’m 100% in support of removing interest.
However, once again, Mycena seems to be swatting a fly with a bazooka.
(identified problem: 36 users generating half the wealth. solution: site-wide change affecting 100% of users)

But I’m also concerned with the disconnect between the changes to the site, and the stated reasons for those changes. That’s happened before too.
It seems like the low-level or mechanical changes (including things like removing staff involvement in the CC, sprout delivery, etc) made in the last while are all towards some purpose, but I’m not sure what that purpose is and it certainly feels like something isn’t being said.

(Edited for tone.)

VelyChimerical
-edited- nevermind lmao, I was totally wrong, I never realized that interest did in fact decrease when you have more nuggets x) The first graph is correct for the amount of nuggets you get from interest, which is what I was thinking.

---

I’ll just throw in my thoughts as well, in that I wholeheartedly agree that the issue doesn’t lie in the interest, it’s in the lack of activity for players on the site to spend their money on, as in nothing to really do other than save money for pretty pets. Between events, honestly my only incentive to log in IS to collect daily interest and to fish, because I don’t often get new pets. 100n a day is hardly worth it unless some other feature is added that makes me want to log in every day. The current games do not do it for me, and I agree that with the current user base, it’s difficult to find RP partners, let alone keep an ongoing discussion (if you go into the RP forums, most replies are several days, even months apart). Something needs to change, but I don’t honestly think removing interest is the solution. Cap it, reconfigure it, something other than completely get rid of it.

i’d like to point out mc still has a thriving community, but the majority of the ‘old guard’ of mc has been around since 2015 or earlier and it’s become a bit of a drawback of having a small, tight knit community: they’re not as welcoming to newbies, by choice or not; it’s just harder in nearly any situation to adapt into a group of close friends as the only new person, as opposed to a group of newbies floundering together and making friends that way. which i think again comes back to today’s hot topic of new player attracting and retaining.

the community isn’t dead (though it’s…definitely decreased since 2016) though! since discord became popular many friendgroups have taken to it and a large part of the dedicated playerbase now uses the unofficial mc discord rather than the site’s official live chat (personally, i don’t like such a move but i won’t elaborate on that here).

in more relevant news, i support the update! even if the process to getting an economic juice up is a ‘tinkering, try things until you find a working solution’ sort of thing (which i don’t think it is to begin with), that’s not going to have a hugely detrimental impact here because at the end of the day, mc is closer to an rp/creative community (example: toyhou.se) than it is to a traditional petsite (example: neopets, gaia).

mc is really not a site where you’d go to play a bustling economy capitalism simulator; it’s always been more of a chill out reading corner as opposed to an active study group, if that metaphor makes sense. because of that we probably won’t ever reach the same economic activity levels as fr for example, but imo that’s not the point of mc. fr won’t ever reach the same extent of customization and character focus either; neither petsite formula is more valid than the other, they just appeal to different demographics.

while i think some sort of solution does need to be found to the stagnation issue, it’s not an urgent thing people need to be tearing their hair out over. the decline hasn’t been a sudden drop off a cliff, it’s been happening since CC became PP and mc is still around because it’s first and foremost a creative community. imagine if (for example) fr’s economy suddenly dropped to a crawl and its forums started stagnating — it’d be a mass exodus within half a year i’d imagine.

we can hold out, it’s fine and not worth causing anyone stress on playerbase end or devs end.

Honestly, with the loss of interest, I’m even less likely to spend nuggets.  I’m a working mother. I just do not have the time to grind out the nuggets just to max out every day. I don’t want to end up running out of funds, liking a coat or pet, and not having enough for it. I enjoy money management and working out how to get my funds to stretch that little bit further. We don’t really have an AH to play with or anything like that so planning little saving projects were fun for me.

I currently have enough in the bank to generate a little over 1k interest a day. I got there by buying PP for people in exchange for nuggets. It was worth doing so because of the benefit of interest as long as I managed my funds right. I had the freedom to buy at least one each of the OotS items or a pet every month and if I save a little more I can get all three. Now there will be no incentive for me to buy PP for other people if there is no reason to store nuggets for a rainy day. There is even less reason to buy gems because pets are pretty much worthless unless you especially like the coat for personal reasons. You cannot ‘invest’ in OotS because most of the consistant player base rarely ends up needing coats after they have left the shop. I made that error when I first joined and learned my lesson.

Now I have had a chance to sit back and think about it I’m not a fan of the daily streak. All it takes is to miss one day and progress is shot. I stopped playing FV for exactly that reason when I missed a day because of work only 2 days before my 90-day reward. Never logged in again.

A potential alternate option could be to just have a cap on the interest earned. Maybe when you reach 1k interest that is the max you can get a day no matter if you have more in the bank. The ‘rich’ won’t get exponentially richer and the ‘poor’ can still have something to aspire to. 1k interest is nice because you can get two OotS items or a fodder pet for the generated 30k a month. As it has been said, those gems bought with generated nuggets cannot be counted as a loss to the profit margin because who is to say the person who wanted the items could have bought them if they didn’t have those funds. If you feel getting rid of the interest will boost gem sales, I don’t think this will happen as well as you expect and at what cost to the active player base?

*adjusts my reading glasses and goes back for another lengthy read…..

@Frieza THAT is Rikur?  I didn’t know he had a name.  I thought he was slightly drunk banker dude.

...snickers… he does look slightly drunken now that you mention it. Perhaps he’s not all that trustworthy with gems c; 

Fri has a point ”  And it’s interesting to see the interest removal exacerbate the grinding problem as people who dislike grinding but did it bit by bit over months and years are losing the interest that let them not have to full-grind.  ” After YEARS of grinding, ignoring buying ANYthing and banking my 3k daily I’ve finally reached a point where if I have too much to do with real life work, I can ‘justify’ not reaching my 3k by collecting my bank interest.

And I’m just going to pause to put this forward.  When I first joined and questioned the 3k cap, so many users jumped on top of me saying it was there for a reason.  ?  As a new user I couldn’t earn/buy squat.  They said bank it, collect interest, keep capping my daily 3k and just basically what Fri has said…nose to the grindstone.  I did that , and YEAHHHHH!  Now I have the breathing space!  Now I feel like if I want something that I couldn’t earn for an event (lack of time), or the OotS, I can afford it thanks to the bank interest.

Now that rug has been yanked from under me, and yet again, what tiny bit of ‘yeah!  I can afford/enjoy this’ has been snatched from me yet again. 

Am I considered a ‘rich’ player?  I have no clue, I’m too busy in my own lane, trying to meet my own goals to know.  I’m told there are other players that apparently make gobs of money on here, so rich they have no goals to reach, the 3k must be kept in place no matter what because these mythical elite can’t possibly spend all their points.    ???  really?  Well, good for them, but I still am stuck with a newbie mindset that says I adore the artwork on here, so I’ll slave to have what I can achieve. 

....so do we need to talk about some Elephant in the Room?  Does Mycena Cave need more real life money to keep the servers going?

 

@Vely I can’t see it helping the economy so much as worsening it. With gem rates remaining stagnant, shop prices staying the same, and there generally not being much use for nuggets, all I can see from this is a significant decline in nugget-to-PP exchanges. How many people exchange PP because they are interested in nugget interest? Will the nugget-to-PP rate change or remain the same, with such a slow user and site economy? I’m not so sure nugget value will go up in the next year or two unless other changes are made.

 

Oh dear!  =(  there’s something I hadn’t considered at all.  I’m a ‘poor’ player meaning I’m stuck converting what nuggets I can manage into PP when I do want a Custom, or more rarely a Sprout.  This actually means for the ‘physically poor of us, PP and the route to our customs and sprouts just became harder ;-;

A potential alternate option could be to just have a cap on the interest earned. Maybe when you reach 1k interest that is the max you can get a day no matter if you have more in the bank. The ‘rich’ won’t get exponentially richer and the ‘poor’ can still have something to aspire to. Malis

Yeah I think restructuring interest could be a very interesting discussion, though staff doesn’t really back down from these sorts of things once announced.  What’s cool about interest is it has a functional cap already.  It currently takes 3.something million to hit 2k in interest and something like 100 million for 3k.  You very quickly reach a point where your next million nuggets earns you 50 nuggets more in interest, etc. 

I think this exponential growth from the rich talk is a bit incorrect.  Again under our current system, in 3-4 months you can earn 80% of what the hyper-established players make.  And I did some rough calculations earlier that didn’t account for interest some of the time, but you can hit 2m nuggets and be about done with the benefits of hoarding for interest in about 16 months.  Granted people will want to spend in that time so this stretches out for people, but top level wealth is very attainable for new players.  The issue is if they can handle the 3k per day grind.  That is the actual barrier between poorer players and rich, not the interest. 

OregonCoast

IMO the cap makes sense, especially since gems have a set value. Inflation could become an issue and perhaps we would see PP cost 30k rather than 20k, someone could buy a ton of items in one day and have nothing left to do, etc.

What I’d like to see before a cap removal/significant cap raise would be the creation of a new need plus a repeat consumable item to address that need. (Crafting systems need materials and battle systems need weapons/repairs/healing/magic, just for two examples.) With a regular sink, raising the cap would work out better without flooding the economy with nuggets. I think any game economy I’ve seen has had a cap on the minigames earnings but no cap on loot from quests, battles, and so on. The main difference in those games is that they have something you can do basically forever while still having gameplay and loot.

Something like that would make MC very different from how it is now, though.

OregonCoast

Oh dear!  =(  there’s something I hadn’t considered at all.  I’m a ‘poor’ player meaning I’m stuck converting what nuggets I can manage into PP when I do want a Custom, or more rarely a Sprout.  This actually means for the ‘physically poor of us, PP and the route to our customs and sprouts just became harder ;-;Ore

I think this is the point, to be honest. The way the change is framed is “Mycena Cave cannot afford to continue generating on the order of $700 worth of nuggets every month in bank interest alone.” - the implication there is that that money needs to come from somewhere else. Considering who it targets, it seems obvious the intent is to “encourage” those 36 users generating $350 (or the 202 users generating the $650-ish) to stop relying on free money and spend some of their own.

My personal impression and experience (though it doesn’t necessarily reflect other people’s) is that I’m already spending as much $$ on this website as I’m comfortable with (maybe a little more tbh, considering the NZD:USD exchange rate the last year-ish). But selling nuggets for PP has always been a small way to offset custom costs for me, wayyyyyy below offsite trading and opening my own wallet. I don’t believe this change will influence my purchasing much and encourage me to buy gems with USD, except possibly in a very meta way where I do so purely to support the site. I can only imagine how frustrating this might be for folks whose only way to get PP was via nugget sales, who were already struggling to buy PP at 1:22 or even 1:25k lately.

Ahaha,  I’ve been playing for 3 years, but 100 nuggets is about how much I make in interest anyway! XD

So I did some thinking and some reading since my initial post and I’d like to point out a few things in regards to the discussion that’s been happening; my initial feeling that this change is for the best has not subsided.

(frieza, tagging you because my first two points are sort of responses to some of yours)

1. Many people on this site simply don’t have time to dedicate, say, the hour or two a day it takes in order to grind when you’re just starting out at the games. For example, when I’m working, I have the time to check in on the site and see if anything new has happened, and I might be able to squeeze in a single game of Spellstones, the only game I’m okayish at, but…that’s all my work schedule allows for. And during my nights, I could play more, but…the games don’t feel like games to me. Not anymore. They feel like…well, work, and I come home and hop on pet sites to decompress and relax, not to do more work.

2. The repetitive mouse clicking all of the games require actually hurts people with wrist injuries such as carpal tunnel. Recently I broke my wrist; the cast and the pain from the injury meant I physically could not play the games or risk further damage to my wrist. So I didn’t max out.

3. Despite me feeling that this change is for the best, I agree with Jacq’s “swatting a fly with a bazooka” simile. While Mycena has never been a democracy, it is starting to feel increasingly like (I’m not sure of the exact parallel to a governing system oops) a place where a small council of people make decisions “for the greater good of the majority” without really pausing to see how the majority feels. Do I know if this decision should have been made more publicly? No. Quite frankly I’m not good at running things. So I’ll take staff’s word that this change was thoroughly discussed and made with your community’s best interests at heart.

I also want to point out that I love Mycena Cave. My current online friend group is made up almost entirely of people I’ve met here. So I am all for changes that increase the longevity and sustainability of this site; I want to see it stick around as long as possible.

. Many people on this site simply don’t have time to dedicate, say, the hour or two a day it takes in order to grind when you’re just starting out at the games. For example, when I’m working, I have the time to check in on the site and see if anything new has happened, and I might be able to squeeze in a single game of Spellstones, the only game I’m okayish at, but…that’s all my work schedule allows for. And during my nights, I could play more, but…the games don’t feel like games to me. Not anymore. They feel like…well, work, and I come home and hop on pet sites to decompress and relax, not to do more work.

The repetitive mouse clicking all of the games require actually hurts people with wrist injuries such as carpal tunnel. Recently I broke my wrist; the cast and the pain from the injury meant I physically could not play the games or risk further damage to my wrist. So I didn’t max out.Purr

I feel like I am being boxed in and asked to defend the games.  Like I get it…some people don’t like the games, some people are busy, some people might have health or mobility issues.  It’s what’s on offer.  Hopefully they will mix it up and give people more options.  But not liking the games or not making time for them is, to some degree, on the individual. 

I can’t really speak to the work issue because Spellstones is a deeper thing for me.  I am not 100% thrilled to play it each time I play it, but I am the best player of all time in it and have competitors in people like Kali and Styx.  Games are a more three-dimensional part of the site for me and I can’t fully relate to most people’s experience.

Most folks can make more money more quickly by grinding on FR (via coli, the auction house, or dragon flipping) and selling that for MC currency. Like if anyone have a few hours a day to burn doing something they don’t enjoy, you could probably even just sign up for MTurk and have the same amount of fun to generate a buck or two.
(not that I have experiments running there that need participants or anything *whistles*)

idk, I don’t wanna knock MC’s games too much. They’re fun, and I like them, but I’ve been burnt out on them for years (well i still like the potions one but it doesn’t play nice with some of my software like f.lux). But I don’t think telling a newbie to play the same 4 games for literally hours every day for 3-4 months without buying something is a good way to convince them the site is fun and accessable. (though this is old arguments rehashed lol).

I mean… who is telling newbies to grind for hours a day for 4 months?  I heavily advocate for people becoming actually competent at these games so they can grind in 20 mins a day… I have been talking about this for years at this point.  In the end I don’t disagree with you guys that things could be better for new players.  Hence me saying the division between rich and poor is the 3k grinding, not interest itself.  I’m also saying that, though it would be great if grinding conditions improved, people’s status in our current situation is to some degree on them.  Even if it’s reasonable for it to be on them.

And it’s a given people will spend in the 4 month time frame.  But you should be spending less than what you earn across time as you build up your wealth.  Like save for a month, spend half of what you saved.  People have a really weird time perception in all of this, as far I am concerned.  Like the idea of easing into wealth across time is a big no no.  Everything must be hyper-accessible compared to where it is now.  That forgets the notion that these people will in theory be here for years.  Okay so everyone’s wildest dreams come true the first five minutes of playing MC.  Then what, you know? 

I think MC is paralyzed by fear over what has ruined other petsites, and as a result of being too afraid to take risks - especially ones that may lead to that most dreadful, terrifying of petsite words, inflation - has stagnated itself.

The fact is, new features are a risk. Economics is not so simple that there’s a formula that lets you do it “right.” And it’s not just economics that we’re dealing with, here, it’s game development. It’s not enough to make sure that the economy is “balanced,” but that making and spending within that economy is an engaging, cathartic experience. I understand the concern that loosening the flat nugget-to-gem ratio will lead to hyper-inflation of nugget vs. gem prices, but wouldn’t that also solve the problem of unbacked gems in the system?

There is no “clean” solution. What I feel like must be said, however, is that you cannot bank on your players.

Players are fickle. They’re changeable, capricious, and prone to following the first shiny thing that crosses their field of vision. As staff, you cannot make decisions under the false assumption that you’ve built up loyalty, that users will stay. With every update, every change, every new feature, you have to sell your product anew.

What product are you offering me, MC?

There are pretty pets, but getting them requires me to put in about 30-60 minutes of my time on the same four minigames a day. There’s roleplay, but with a community of 50-100 people online at a time, what are the chances of matching more than one person to my specific tastes, if that? There’s a bank, but saving nuggets doesn’t earn you proportional interest. And there’s…pretty much nothing else.

People aren’t buying because there’s nothing to invest in. I understand that Myla and Glitch lead busy lives outside of MC, but without their investment in the site, they won’t see any dividends. If it really is becoming that difficult to maintain the site, then what’s needed now is not changes that feels like punishments, but new life to attract new customers. And that will require risks that might not pay off, that will require time and possibly even monetary investments before it’s clear whether or not they will work.

I understand there are new features in the works, but I can’t believe how long it’s taken for them to be implemented - with usercounts this low, I’d be panicking, personally. I’d have been panicking since they hit five hundred. But since those features ARE coming, I’m quite frankly a little shocked that this update was not bundled along with them.

People tend to misunderstand my harsh words as being undue negativity or pessimism, but I’ve only ever had good intentions. I want MC to succeed. I like the site, I like the art, I even like some of the people (which is a real shocker, cuz petsite communities and all). And I think MC can become a good game, I think it has all the right foundations - staff that care, loyal users, cute art - but you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

Well…that’s just my TL;DR opinion, though. I’d meant to keep my head down since I came back, but, gosh darn it, I’ve been chasing that 2010 Neopets high since 2010 came to a close, and nothing has managed to even come close. I’m dying, Squirtle.

To be honest, removing bank interest will only make me less likely to spend nuggets, not encourage it. >.>; It will mean I won’t have the security net of knowing I’ll be able to at least make up those extra nuggets, so will make me less willing to spend what I do have, and only on things I absolutely need to spend on in order to not have to pay more later. I was finally at a point in playing MC where I felt like I could actually spend nuggets on things that aren’t relatively urgent/time-sensitive (oots/seasonals/missed event stuff). I still haven’t bought the backgrounds or most of the items I’ve wanted for ages for my pets because they are so expensive just in the MC shops. And they are usually only fractionally cheaper in the bazaar if they are there. I just spent a massive amount on an event kelph because I was sick and missed the event - and I only felt I was able to buy it because of how much interest had been adding daily (and I only even had that interest because another player quit and gifted me most of their nuggets in the first place). Without the security of bank interest, I’ll still be mainly spending nuggets on oots/seasonals and keeping the rest in reserve in case I miss another event, and maybe someday years from now have enough saved up for fodder. Even with the interest I have, I still barely feel comfortable enough spending it on the backgrounds/items I’ve been wanting for so long, since that will mean less of a security net in case I miss another event. And with my health as it has been this year, that’s likely to happen eventually.

At the current nugget/gem exchange rate, of 3,600 nuggets per gem (I have almost never seen it more than 1-10 nuggets cheaper than that since PP was implemented), you need a minimum 57,600 nuggets per month, which is at least 20 days grinding games for dailies. The 50-100 nuggets log in thing is really about as negligible an amount as fishing, so isn’t more than a day or two less grinding. So 20 days, if I manage to log in and grind every day, and on top of that there’s the seasonals at 72,000 nuggets. With the remaining 10 or so days, every three months 72,000 goes to the seasonal, which leaves about 18k nuggets of money going into the bank every three months. So 6-7k per month spending money is what I expect to have if I remember to log in and max out every single day and not miss the oots/seasonals. Which I suspect is the point, but for me personally, if I wasn’t willing to buy the oots with real life money already, I’m not going to be ‘encouraged’ to do so by losing bank interest. If I miss them, I miss them, and I will be sad, but I can’t reasonably afford to pay real money.

Will the gem price actually drop for once, with interest gone? If it does, I might end up buying gems with nuggets from other players, rather than exchanging 3600 nuggets to the site for each gem. That would at least benefit the site from other people buying gems, but I’m not convinced it will happen. Everyone seems to want PP these days. I’d simply never be able to afford enough PP for a custom or sprout, so all my plans for that are gone, since people are unlikely to want PP for nuggets after the change. :/ Missing multiple pets (oots/seasonals) so I can afford one custom that will probably be barely edited because of how little I can afford nugget-wise, just isn’t worth it to me.

During the last event, I calculated how much I would need to turn all the event shrooms I’ve gotten from past events into actual pets, and it was nearly 800k. If I want to be able to afford the oots and seasonals, it means it’ll probably be literal years (at least 4-5) before I can afford to even have those pets from events I was actually around for years ago. I can only imagine how much worse it’ll be for a new player who’ll have to not only afford fodder but the shrooms from events they missed in the past, without having the assistance of bank interest. But seeing as I only have significant bank interest because another player quit, I suspect most players won’t even notice the upcoming change if they haven’t already gotten to a level of significant interest. As for using nuggets on customs/sprouts - that’s pretty much impossible for me now. Even if I could trade off-site currencies for nuggets or PP, I wouldn’t, as the exchange rate is likely to tank, and there’d be no point in saving up until I find a buyer. And with how hard it already is to make nuggets, those will be going almost entirely toward saving for fodder for the next few years. :( Buying PP with nuggets is out of the question if I ever want to actually have the pets I have those shrooms for.

I’m just glad I got a head start on saving, so it’ll at least cut the number of years I’ll need to save up. Perhaps removing bank interest will encourage people to spend those nuggets for gems from other players and for PP, but for me personally, it will have the opposite effect. :c